This paper, planned for a special issue of Osiris, explores how spectacular failures in complex systems transformed the category of “accidents” in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The vast expansion […]

Post navigation

I am a historian of the social and cultural life of technologies, focusing on the intertwined histories of machines, trust, and social order in modern Europe and North America. My research is particularly interested in the history of technological failure as a way of exploring the place of machines and machine behaviors in the fabric of modern societies. My first book — The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2017) — focused on how failing machines helped define hostile natures and national identity during the Cold War. My current book project — Reliable Humans, Trustworthy Machines — examines how observers from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries saw machine failures as a problem of the self: a problem of the kinds of people that failing machines created, threatened, or presupposed.

I am Associate Professor in the Department of History at York University. I received my PhD in history of science from Harvard University. During 2016-2017, I was the Northrop Frye Visiting Fellow at the University of Toronto.

Upcoming Talks

Theaters of Machines: Reimagining Histories of Technology and the SelfMarch 8, 2018 at 12:30 – 14:30History Department Colloquium, University of British Columbia